"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Goin' back to school

Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!

“I think the best way to deal with this is to ignore him,” [Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma] Gonzales asserted. “I think we can all agree that the things that President Trump tweets is nothing that will have a lasting impact — unless it’s a negative lasting impact — on the people around us.”

"At this point especially, the things that he mentions when he brings up talk of the FBI, he’s trying to blame somebody,” she added. “And we can’t let him do that. So, the best thing for us to do is to ignore him and to continue fighting our fight, the fight that he refuses to acknowledge. The fact that he refused to even tweet the word ‘gun’ in any of his tweets. And yet, he insists on tweeting, and he insists on blaming the Democrats for something that he did wrong — looking back into the past instead of looking forward into the future.”

Great Pollster John McLaughlin now has the GOP up in the Generic Congressional Ballot. Big gain over last 4 weeks. I guess people are loving the big Tax Cuts given them by the Republicans, the Cuts the Dems want to take away. We need more Republicans!

Democratic chances of keeping one House seat in New Jersey and winning two more have improved, according to one of the Washington-based publications tracking congressional races.

While a president's party traditionally loses congressional seats in an off-year election, President Donald Trump is having an outsized influence in a state where only 34 percent in a Gallup poll approve of his performance in office.

"President Trump is fueling the Democratic Party right now," said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of Inside Elections. "He's the reason for the energy. He's the reason for the campaign donations. He's the reason some of these candidates are getting into the race."

In 2013, 34 Republicans ran without major-party opposition. In 2015, that number rose to 44. But in 2017, it dropped to only 12. Six Republicans who lost their seats in 2017 held seats that were not contested in 2015.

Now in Texas, which recently had a filing deadline, Democrats are contesting 14 of 15 state Senate seats and 133 of 150 state House seats. In 2016, 60 Republicans ran without a Democratic challenger (out of 150 seats up for election) in the state House while six of the 29 state Senate seats up for election were uncontested (state Senate terms are staggered).

"Donald Trump is fueling the Democratic Party right now." I'm getting campaign material from Democrats for the Texas primary in amounts I've never seen before. They mean to win the primary, and they mean to win in November. What was once a lost cause is now a mission.